Emancipation

“Reform and opening” started from the top with the seminal leadership transition from Mao to Deng. Deng Xiaoping heralded China’s boom in late 1978 when he called for experiments with “economic democracy” and “emancipation” from orthodox ideas. But the boom was not simply a top-down, state-orchestrated phenomenon. In fact, the biggest contribution of the state, especially in the first phase of growth, was to get out of the way. Farmers were liberated from collectives, sparking a wildfire of capitalism in the countryside. Urban markets and industry were freed to “grow out of the plan,” making profits on surplus production and creating powerful incentives for rapid growth.

The Birth of Private Workers, The Death of People’s Communes

One Child Policy Stimulated Growth

People Who Fall Behind Will Be Beaten

Deng Understood That the World Had Changed

Philip P. Pan

Moscow Bureau Chief, The Washington Post

Philip P. Pan is the Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post and the newspaper’s former Beijing bureau chief. During his tour in China from 2000 to 2007, he won the Livingston Award for Young Journalists in international reporting, the Overseas Press Club’s Bob Considine Award for best newspaper interpretation of international affairs and the Asia Society’s Osborne Elliott Prize for excellence in journalism about Asia. He is a graduate of Harvard College and studied Chinese at Peking University.

And so, you had this concern about the population, it extended during the Mao era as well. There had been different attempts to manage population growth during that time, but the one-child policy was, really, a radical departure from anything that had been tried before. And the argument made by its advocates, which was originally a group of rocket scientists who came up with this, was that they used their computers and ballistic formulas to project how the Chinese population might grow and they had access to sort of Western thinking about population studies at that time and at that time, it was commonly thought that the world faced a population disaster. So, they had access to these ideas, they combined it with their mathematical formulas that they had, and the access to computers which most other policy makers didn’t have access to, and they came up with these projections and they presented it to the leadership essentially as, "If we don’t do anything, this country is ruined. The economy cannot grow fast enough to sustain the population that we have and not only that, but the environment won't be able to sustain the population that we have. And the half measures that we have taken previously will not be enough. The only way to move forward is with the one-child policy." They presented it as the only viable option. The leadership accepted this and implemented it. Sometimes, people forget that the one child policy was devised by the same people who endorsed the party retreating from so many other aspects of people's lives and embraced these market reforms. At the same time, they are stepping in and really regulating the most private decisions of families. So, it was sort of a contradiction.